Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Crows!

crow in watercolor on Fluid hot-pressed paper - copyright Jan Gibson

Crows really intrigue me and I find them very inventive and smart as well as numerous around here! I've been painting them in different poses and think I've begun to build my mental muscle memory so it's a bit easier to paint them now.

However, I recently got an order which included some Fluid brand watercolor samples which I used for the above crow. Huge mistake as I fought the paper the whole time.

Hot-pressed watercolor paper is my usual when I use watercolors but this brand did not perform like any other I've used. I did try some colored pencil on it and it seemed to work well for that. Too bad I donated all my quality colored pencils to our local high school! But, good thing I only got 3 sheets of the paper to try!

This crow was painted before the first one and was a fun learning experience. However, I decided the background was too intense and tried to soften it a bit and ruined the painting! I think the 'bones' of the painting work though and may eventually repaint it with gouache.

Or maybe not as I usually don't like to mess with a painting once I've done it once!

2 comments:

I put some mealworms out to feed the robins and blackbirds in our garden but two huge crows beat them to it! They really are magnificent birds.

Of the two, I prefer the second/bottom painting - are you saying this is the 'ruined' background as I think it looks great? Think I've said before that I really enjoy your looser works like this and the pen/ink study you did for your dad

I prefer the bottom one too. I thought the background in the painting displayed here in the blog was too distracting so I took some water and tried to soften the edges/color on the actual painting. It didn't work so well so I didn't show it here on the blog. This photo is the original before I messed with it. Wish I'd left it alone & just added a spot of white to brighten up the eye!

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About Me

I'm an artist living in the middle of the boonies but usually enjoying every minute of it. Living in the country means no cable or super fast internet connection and certainly no brick and mortar art stores within easy reach. But it also means that we have an abundance of wildlife right outside our door as well as beautiful landscape vistas just about anywhere we look. That's well worth the lack of modern conveniences to me.